“I didn’t say they’d have been limited to being underground. That’s just where they’d live. But for all we know, they’re wandering around out here themselves.”
“If they could do that, wouldn’t they have moved to a sunnier world?” asked Mary. “Someplace warm?”
“Maybe,” said Denise, “some wanted to stay home. Like people who won’t leave town when a hurricane’s coming.” She looked at Jake. “You were there. What do you think?”
Jake had no clue. “It looked to me like nothing but ice and rock. I couldn’t imagine anything living there. Still, we did see lights.”
“None of it makes any sense,” said Tony. “A hypercivilization would have moved the world elsewhere, or encased it, or done something that we’d be able to see.”
“Well,” said Samantha, “there is the artwork.”
“You think that’s really what it is?” asked Tony.
“I’ve talked to a number of specialists. Nobody can account for it as a natural occurrence.”
“Whatever they might be,” said Mary, “they didn’t attack Priscilla and Jake. That suggests they might be pretty advanced.”
Denise smiled. “Maybe they saw no need to attack anybody. Maybe they concluded we’re not very bright and pose no threat.” She realized what she’d said and looked at Jake. “I guess I didn’t phrase that very well, Jake. That’s not quite what I meant.”
He laughed. “It’s all right, Denise. I’ve been called worse.”
Her smile widened. “I guess we can all see who’s the dummy around here. But seriously, there are other possibilities. They’ve had millions of years. At least. They may have been initially underground, but eventually they could have transformed into something else entirely. They may have adapted to the cold. They may have gotten control of the climate. We tend to assume you have to have sunlight and water to have life. That’s not necessarily true.”
“Can you offer any examples, Denise?” asked Samantha.
“We have life-forms in the oceans that have never seen the sun. Though I’ll confess you probably have to have it, along with water, to get started. But life is tenacious. Once it gets rolling, it’s very good at adapting.”
“Maybe,” said Tony, “intelligent life is there, but on a very small scale. So small we wouldn’t be able to see their cities.”
Denise’s eyes sparkled. “Tony, that may be pushing it a bit.”
* * *
THE OFFICIAL PURPOSE of the mission was to recover Otto’s body. That was a relatively prosaic, if requisite, matter, but Samantha explained they didn’t want to get everyone excited about aliens, then look foolish if they came home with no answers. But the actual intention was to determine what precisely had happened to the Vincenti lander. How had it gotten almost intact to the ground? “What we’ll do,” she said, “is just try to get some indication whether the business with the lander could have been, in any way, the result of natural causes. Or whether something else is happening.”
* * *
DENISE WAS A fitness nut. The interstellars all had a workout room, and it was usually cramped and boring. This one was no exception. Priscilla had ignored the one on the Copperhead. Jake was inclined not to bother either when he didn’t have company. So he’d gained a few pounds on that certification flight.
The Venture had a treadmill and a stationary bike. And Denise produced an elastic cord two feet long. “It functions as a bungee.”
“In what way?” asked Jake.
“Come on. I’ll show you.” She demonstrated, using it to stretch arms and legs. Jake tried it.
“The best way to do it,” she said, “is for us to play tug-of-war.”
“In zero gravity?” asked Jake.
“Try it.”
Each took one end of the bungee and grabbed hold of a handrail. Then they began to pull. The cable tightened, and Jake got surprised when Denise, who wasn’t much more than half his size, yanked him off his feet. He quickly discovered that hanging on to both the cord and the handrail was tricky. It didn’t help that he began to laugh. Finally, he released his hold on the rail and, as he was dragged through the air, lapsed into hysterics.
Odd things happen in zero gee.
Tony and Mary came in to see what the commotion was. “Don’t worry about it, Jake,” Tony said. “She does that to everybody.”
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING of his career, Jake had thought of the pleasures of starflight as being contained in the arrival at whatever far-flung destination, with its alien sunlight and its family of planets, with the vast oceans sometimes found on Goldilocks worlds, with rings and moons and comets, with the potential for other life-forms and always, especially, the possibility of a new civilization. That was what it had been about.
But he’d quickly discovered that there was an interior pleasure to be had as well, derived from sharing the experience with others driven by similar passions. Even to the extent of simply taking advantage of the sense of being together in a place so distant from the rest of humanity. It reminded him of how fortunate he was. And that he had no way to explain any of this to Alicia. He realized that he’d blundered. He should have found a way weeks ago to take her on a flight. When he got home, he’d do it. No way she could decline.
* * *
LIBRARY ENTRY
The more we study art, the less we care for nature. What art really reveals to us is nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished erudition.
—Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1889
Chapter 47
THE BLEU-CHEESE SALAD was delicious. Priscilla was wearing a soft, silky blouse to which she’d just treated herself. It was midnight blue and intended as compensation for missing the Orfano flight. Drake Peifer, seated across the table, was frowning at his sandwich.
“Not good?” she asked.
“It’s okay. A bit flat.”
Behind him, through the room-length window, a comet was gliding past, its tail of incandescent gas disappearing behind the curtains near the host’s desk. She could also see moving lights at Moonbase.
Drake was scheduled to leave in an hour on a flight to Quraqua. He saw that she was focused on the window and turned to look. “The view is spectacular enough,” he said. “I don’t think they need the comet.”
She smiled. “Maybe not. But the tourists love it.” It was, of course, a projection. But that didn’t matter. Everyone in the Skyview, forty or fifty people, stared at it with their mouths open. Even the people in the silver-and-blue uniforms.
“But it’s outward-bound, Priscilla.”
“So what?”
“The tail should be in front of it.”
Priscilla tried to remember what she knew about comets. She was more into ship operations and couldn’t recall ever having seen a comet up close. “I thought the tail was always in the rear. Isn’t that why they call it a tail?”
Drake shook his head. “Not really. I mean, if they do this stuff, they should get the science right.”
Priscilla waved it away and went back to her salad. Drake was amiable enough, but he tended to be a perfectionist. Anyone mispronouncing a word in his presence would get a tolerant smile. Some poor woman would pay a price for that one day. “I prefer my tails in the rear,” she said. But he was looking over her shoulder now, not paying attention. “What’s going on back there, Drake?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, “I was just watching the kids.” There were about a dozen of them who’d left their tables and were lined up along the window, pointing and laughing at the comet. “An experience like that, for a child, is probably a life-changer. The world will never look the same.” Frank was also back there, sitting alone at a table, engrossed in his notebook. And a thin guy with blond hair who looked lost. Priscilla sipped her tea. “It’s too bad we can’t get everybody on the planet up here for a couple of hours. Maybe there’d be a lot less parochialism.”